Chapter 2. The Historical Forms of Christian Thought

(1) The Founding of Christianity

p. 100 Christianity received as its inheritance the religious legacy the Jewish people had gained from their historical experience. This was the most important background Christianity received. In addition, Christianity took much from the cultural environment of its time: Greek philosophy, and the political skill of Rome.¹

But Christianity possessed from the first a distinctiveness that transcended this historical background and cultural environment. Christianity was founded on the personality, the thought and the life of Jesus of Nazareth. His surpassing thought and his noble life showed the people of his day a new world of life. Those who came to know this wondrous new life in lived experience² found that their awakening, their zeal and their resolve could not be expressed in the inherited forms of religion, and when they realized this, Christianity arose with a force that neither cruel persecution nor ceaseless opposition could put down. For them Jesus was the standard of life and its encouragement. In Jesus they saw humanity at its height, and they tasted the grace of God.

Early Christianity was therefore faith in Jesus. It is a fact that apart from Jesus Christianity could not have come into being. They poured all the intellectual power of their age into inquiring into the metaphysical character of this personality, and they also sought to vindicate his transcendent mission from historical evidence; but in the end these were no more than p. 101 the forms in which their belief in and veneration of the personality of Jesus of Nazareth were concentrated.

Second, early Christianity was holy living itself. For them Christianity was the experience of liberation, with Jesus as its central personality. To believe in Jesus was to gain through him a new life like no other, and to live truly and rightly. Their living had two sides, trust and obedience. Trust means to know God, who is Father, to rely on him, to love him and to be in fellowship with him. Obedience means the formation of personality and the rebuilding of a new humanity,³ which start from the experience of redemption. Through Christ they saw that a miraculous transformation of life had taken place in their own living, and they could not cease to marvel at it; and their sense of being called, of having taken up the work Christ left behind, became the motive and the power of a new life.

Third, early Christianity included the holy fellowship of the believers. As vital experience deepened within and social responsibility grew heavier without, it became necessary that those who lived in Jesus with the same aims and the same purpose should keep company with one another and labour and work together for the sake of the gospel. This is the church of Christ. This church was less an institution organized by forms and policies than an organic relation, with Christ as its head and the believers as its members, bound together in love and service.⁴

(2) Greek Christianity

When in the first century Christianity met the brilliant light of Greek culture, which then held sway along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, it came to display⁵ intellectual features, p. 102 and this was a meaningful preparation for the great work that lay before it, the conquest of the barbarian world. They set forth profound doctrines of the spiritual life and its development, and "made clear that to this day the created order moves according to a unified law, and the evolutionary character of history, and the universality of God's providence."⁶

From the passing of the apostolic age until early in the patristic period, the history of Christian thought is wrapped in darkness and concealment, so that it is hard to find positive material⁷ enough to trace an accurate line of thought. Yet even with the few fragmentary documents we have, we can glimpse the outline of this period's thought. Above all, the Letter to Diognetus⁸ is the work of someone deeply influenced by Greek thought. It says that the principle of Christianity lies in what Plato taught, the so-called highest aspiration of humanity, namely the imitation of God; and that since human beings were created in God's image, they are able to imitate God. The writer stressed the need of knowledge, and showed plainly that without knowledge there is no life, and that the pursuit of a life cut off from knowledge is easily led into sin.⁹

Justin Martyr, a representative of the educated class of the second century, turned from Platonism to Christian thought. He maintained that Christianity is the philosophy of philosophies, the religion that gives the fullest satisfaction to one's intellectual demands and one's moral character.¹⁰ He believed that the spiritual life has order and development, and that conscience and reason are universal; and he said that Christ is "the Word that any people may receive, so that anyone who lives in accord with this truth, be it Socrates or Heraclitus, or even a person who calls himself an atheist, may be called a Christian."¹¹

The theology of the second and third centuries arose in the theological school of Alexandria, where Jewish thought and Greek thought flowed together. p. 103 Here all the peoples of the world lived side by side, so that religious thought could not escape a measure of confusion and doubt; but here for the first time the most pregnant and rational theology could be taught.¹² Clement of Alexandria stressed that Greek philosophy had been a preparation for revelation, and said that anyone who doubted this doubted the possibility of revelation.¹³ His fundamental thought was that Christ, as the indwelling divinity, is nowhere absent.¹⁴ This world is part of an organic whole,¹⁵ and moves always toward one lofty purpose under a fixed law of God. Humanity has its life and being in Christ,¹⁶ and so seeks always to form a new relation with Christ. Not only the elect but all humanity is under grace and law; and the unity and sacredness of human history lie in the ordered record of the footprints of God's revelation shown in the world. So Clement said.

Origen, who followed Clement, was also infected by the Neoplatonism of his day, and believed that any religious thought whatever could be harmonized, gathered up and reconciled by it. The origin of evil, the fall of the angels, the pre-existence of souls, the body as the prison of the soul, the worship of angels: all these too he interpreted in an all-embracing eclecticism.¹⁷ That he won authority as the representative figure of Greek theology may be said to lie in his exposition of the Trinity by his Logos Christology. By his doctrine of the generation of the Son he was able to make clear that there is a necessary, organic connection and fellowship between the Father, "the Son" and the Holy Spirit; that, against the pagan thought which held that God can in no way enter into communion, the communion between God and "the Son" rests on God's eternal nature; p. 104 that Jesus, as the sun gives forth its light, is the source of the life and the light of the whole creation; and that God's mercy, love and power are revealed to humanity without ceasing through the historical process.¹⁸

Athanasius,¹⁹ who carried on from Origen, likewise taught a theology centred on the doctrine of the Trinity. He said that through Christ we came to know the true nature and power of God, that the wall standing between God and humanity was taken away,²⁰ and that we came to know the pure nature of humanity. The distinctive point of his idea of the incarnation²¹ was that all humanity is united in Christ. Christ, as the head and representative of all humanity, had an organic relation with humanity, so that his personality and his work became humanity's own. Athanasius opposed Arianism and maintained that the three persons are one in essence, and for this he took up the term "homoousios." This term was able to repel the pagan thought that took the three persons for a polytheistic union; but it carried a pantheistic colouring of its own, so that it was a danger on both sides.²² That the church's first general council nevertheless received it into the orthodox creed may be said to be owing to its agreement with Greek philosophical thought.²³ From whatever side one views it, this means the victory of intellectual Christianity in the East.

(3) Latin Christianity

The Latin peoples held comparatively fast to the traditional faith, gave all their strength to building and organizing the church, and developed, rather than a theology of pure reason, a practical theology of the most concrete kind. Here Christianity, which is spiritual lived experience and life, was entirely institutionalized. The forms of religion are means of symbolizing experience and preserving it, and they can be changed as circumstances differ and demand; but once the system of faith has become fixed and the institution defined, they often make the living vitality wither away.²⁴ Augustine, the spokesman of Latin theology,²⁵ drew on the deep lived experience p. 105 he had learned in the course of his own intellectual history and spiritual striving;²⁶ in the light of it he defended the church as the concrete institution that overcomes the weakness and ignorance of human nature, and stressed that the church is the treasury of truth, the sole authority that guards and proclaims the traditional way of salvation.²⁷

The positions on religious form can be divided broadly into three kinds: sacramentalism, institutionalism and dogmatism.²⁸

Sacramentalism (Secramentalism [sic])²⁹ not only thinks of the sacraments as a method of symbolic expression of faith; it believes that the sacramental elements themselves carry a mysterious power and are a "mediating grace," joining the infinite God and finite human beings. It fixes a definite sacramental form on the authority of tradition, and makes this the holy means by which the grace of God is received.

Institutionalism (Institutionalism) holds that the church is the lawful body of the saints, governed and administered by clergy who have received the apostolic succession; that possessing the Scriptures, the creeds and tradition, it is the sole guide that judges and directs the truth or falsity, the rightness or wrongness, of all the believers' actions and thoughts; that whatever is done within it is free of error and fault; and that everyone can obtain salvation only through the church.

Dogmatism (Dogmatism) regards Christianity as the depository, or the announcing agency, of supernatural revelation. God belongs to a mysterious world that human beings cannot know by ordinary knowledge, and so, if human beings are to obtain knowledge of God, there is no way but revelation, which transcends human knowledge. The system that holds this revelation in store is doctrine; p. 106 human knowledge may not criticize its truth or falsity, and to accept the existing system as it stands is the absolute condition for entering salvation. So dogmatism believes.

(4) Medieval Christianity

The Middle Ages are called the harvest time of Christianity. In the Middle Ages the church, which had been laid out over many centuries since the founding of Christianity, was completed, and the religious thought of the ages was brought to its full achievement.

Medieval Christianity, in essence as in form, handed on the features of Latin Christianity with little change. The authority of the Roman Catholic Church³⁰ was able to put down the violent disturbances of the barbarian peoples and bring them to submission, and it was equal to leading the benighted populace and giving it spiritual cultivation. So it was that rulers as enlightened as "Charles the Great"³¹ supported the church's policy and sought through it the unity of the state, and in the end there appeared a theocracy with the bishop of Rome as its monarch in fact, and the state was turned into the church.

Another feature of medieval Christianity is the development of "Scholastic philosophy." The ninth century of our era³² was a time when knowledge spread generally among the populace and schools were founded everywhere. Theologians too, stirred by the age's zeal for knowledge, gathered here and there and studied religious thought. Scholastic philosophy arose in this atmosphere. Its basic aim³³ was to defend the traditional doctrine of the Latin church by argument, and to maintain that the doctrines believed in the church agree and harmonize with human reason; it was an intellectual movement set against monasticism, which was founded on pietism.³⁴

p. 107 But not all of medieval Christianity followed scholastic theology. Many who were dissatisfied with a lower theology, one that sought to fit the scholastics' tangled theories and the rules of tradition, left it, longed for the inner life, and strove to stand face to face with God. The pietism of the "Franciscans" and the "Dominicans," whom we know well, was this.³⁵ They held that one must perceive the presence of God directly in daily life, and they made renunciation of the world, abstinence and seclusion the ideal of life.

(5) Christianity after the Reformation

Christianity after the Reformation is so complex and varied in form that it is extremely hard to sum it up under one or two headings. For Protestantism has a certain supple freedom, and, meeting a complex environment of thought, has divided and developed down to the present into a state of fragmentation. Yet through all this many-branched division of thought, the fundamental spirit of the Reformers alone may be said to have held consistent. Professor Harnack, in his celebrated work The Essence of Christianity, has set out the heart of Protestantism under three heads.³⁶

First, Protestantism centred on the gospel and on evangelical lived experience. That is, freed from a Christianity defined by rite, doctrine and institution, it went back to the Word of God and the experience of faith.

Second, Protestantism puts its weight on a new understanding of the grace of God. What consoles and blesses human beings sunk in sin and despair is the free grace of God in Christ. In this grace p. 108 the division within the human being is set right, the oppression that seeks to do harm is overcome, the sense of sin is rooted out, and one can have fellowship with the holy God. So the Reformers believed.

Third, Protestantism holds that God can be pleased only by worshipping him in spirit and truth and relying on him.³⁷ Forms of worship, whether private or public, must be the expression of faith. It believes that the essence of the church is this: that believers who have been made one in Christ share thanksgiving and prayer, praise and hope in holy fellowship.